Blizzard of Criticism

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 27, 2006 10:42 AM

Tony Snow hadn't so much as walked into the briefing room to thank the president for appointing him when the liberal bloggers started ripping him apart.

Welcome to the White House, dude.

The libs were having the most fun rounding up past columns in which the Fox News commentator took potshots at the prez (while ignoring the 90 percent of verbiage in which Snow was supportive).

This strikes me as Beltway entertainment that no one else is going to much care about. David Gergen went through the same thing when he joined Bill Clinton's staff. If Snow had never written a negative word about George W. Bush, critics would have said he's a robot marching in lockstep with the man. Since Snow has chided Bush for spending too much and for a flaccid second-term domestic agenda, the White House spin is that the president is reaching out of his inner circle to bring in an occasional critic.

All this paper-trail scrutiny does is prove that Snow has opinions. You can be sure that from this moment on, his opinions, or, I should say, expressed opinions, will reflect those of his new boss.

More interesting to me is whether Snow will really get to be a policy player, as he's been assured, and whether he can warm up the deep-freeze relationship between the White House and the press corps.

"Even as Democratic groups sent out e-mail messages highlighting some of Mr. Snow's harsher analyses of the president, they said it should not mask his loyalty to his party and his new boss," says the New York Times.

"The groups were also quick to note Mr. Snow's connection to the Fox News Channel, which is where administration officials tend to show up for interviews in times of trouble, as Vice President Dick Cheney did after he accidentally shot a hunting partner last winter.

"Mr. Snow's career change also might not be what Fox News executives want in terms of their public relations defense against criticism that their network is philosophically sympathetic to Mr. Bush.

"As Karen Finney, the Democratic National Committee spokeswoman, put it Wednesday, 'To our mind he is just moving from one part of the conservative infrastructure to another.' Fox executives have dismissed such statements as partisan sniping at the network's conservative opinion makers, Mr. Snow among them, who operate separately from its news division."

In the blogosphere, they're off and running.

The Nation's John Nichols "Veteran Republican retainer Tony Snow will probably be a better prevaricator-in-chief than either McClellan or Fleischer. Why? Because he is a confirmed ideologue who actually believes at least some of the big lies that he will be peddling.

"After all, this is the Fox News commentator who, after the most recent State of the Union address, described the Bush administration as having a 'brilliant foreign policy.'

"Snow is, as well, the political personality who said of what honest conservatives and liberals describe as the most imperial presidency in history: 'No president has looked this impotent this long when it comes to defending presidential powers and prerogatives.' . . .

"If Tony Snow really does not think that George Bush has done enough to defend presidential powers and prerogatives, then he is a fine fit for this imperial presidency. He has not merely drunk the Kool-Aid, he has complained that the mix is not strong enough.

"Where Scott McClellan listlessly disseminated distortion, Snow will do so with gusto."

HuffPost's Marty Kaplan {vbar} takes issue with some comments by Fox's Fred Barnes:

"The last thing Tony should be, he said, is Mr. Nice Guy. If Snow is asked about his paper trail of comments criticizing Bush, now circulating among those pesky bloggers, Barnes said he should tell reporters that he's not going to comment on any of that, nosiree; his job now is to serve the president, not to rehash the past.

"It's refreshing to have the Faustian bargain of serving this administration made so explicit. In exchange for Snow's gaining immortality -- which in this era means being on television so much that his post-Bush speaking fees will exponentially soar -- all he has to give up is everything he stands for. Those anti-Bush cracks? Inoperative. Next question.

"The problem with the McClellan robot wasn't that he was clueless about what was going on in the West Wing; it was that he wasn't charming enough, that he couldn't be reprogrammed with a new set of '. . . ongoing investigation that is ongoing . . . ' loops, that he seemed to have lost interest in attempting to convince the press corps that they had any reason to believe him.

"But as Snow's Fox colleagues attested, McClellan's successor is amiable and good-looking (the two essential signs of gravitas). When Snow stonewalls the press, they'll know he's a true insider, and that he's doing it out of professionalism, not because he's a scared chipmunk."

The blogger at State of the Day can't resist an anti-Fox crack:

"Tony Snow moves from the presidential propaganda channel to the, well, presidential propaganda channel.

"The lines are so blurred I can't see through the Snow."

Let me know when we can put a moratorium on weather jokes.

From the other side of the spectrum, Power Line's John Hinderaker blames the press, not Snow:

"Tony is one of the world's nice people. He is also a close student of the news, and I think he's been known to read our site from time to time. His congeniality and media background will buy him some popularity with the reporters who cover the White House. But essentially all of them are partisan Democrats, so that goodwill will last for about a week. What the White House really needs is someone who can push back aggressively against the liberal tilt of the media, and make the administration's case directly to the people. Tony Snow is equipped to do this, I think; the question is, will he?"

Philly's Dick Polman offers a brilliant analysis (because it agrees with mine):

"Democrats seem to be ecstatic about the transfer of Fox News host Tony Snow to the thankless job of White House press secretary. They have been busy circulating all the embarrassing things that Snow has said lately about President Bush, including his contention last November that Bush has become, well, 'something of an embarrassment.' . . .

"My contrarian instincts now tell me that the Democrats are actually doing Bush a big favor at the moment. Playing right into Bush's hands. Making Bush look good. Democrats are basically advertising today that Bush is not an insulated bubble boy, after all;

"That Bush is willing, in fact, to reach out and hire a guy who has repeatedly busted his chops on national radio and TV; that Bush is not terminally addicted to being surrounded by yes men. Those pithy Snow quotes . . . appear to be proof of that. Moreover, the Democrats, by openly advertising Snow's iconoclasm, have undercut their own longstanding contention that Fox News and all its hirelings are just lickspittles of the administration."

Snow's new job, meanwhile, was quickly overshadowed by a blast from the Valerie Plame past:

"White House political advisor Karl Rove today went to a courthouse where he testified for the fifth time before a federal grand jury investigating his role in the CIA leak case," says the Los Angeles Times

"A source said that Fitzgerald is interested in matters that have arisen since Rove last appeared before the grand jury in October."

Well, that clears that up.

Are you missing the Abramoff scandal? Josh Marshall has a neat little update:

"Oh, ick. Here's David Safavian, the former chief of staff for the General Services Administration, writing to Jack Abramoff in 2000:

" 'Tell me when we can get together. Given how busy you must be, I will clear my decks for a few minutes of your time. After all, you are the most watched lobbyist of the new generation. [I can only hope to follow suit someday ;-) ]'

"That bit of sycophancy comes to you courtesy of the U.S. Attorney's Office, who have just released another stack of the emails between Abramoff and Safavian."

Turning to the mystery of Mary McCarthy's firing, the Wall Street Journal {vbar} editorial page fires a fusillade at the Fourth Estate:

"This would appear to be only the latest example of the unseemly symbiosis between elements of the press corps and a cabal of partisan bureaucrats at the CIA and elsewhere in the "intelligence community" who have been trying to undermine the Bush Presidency . . .

"The case of Ms. McCarthy appears to be as egregious as it gets as a matter of partisan politics. She played a prominent role in the Clinton national security apparatus and public records show she gave $2,000 to John Kerry's Presidential campaign and even more to the Democratic Party. Such is her right. But rather than salute and help implement policy after her candidate lost, she apparently sought to damage the Bush Administration by canoodling with the press . . .

"The press is also inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done)."

Well, the press is not a monolith, and I've talked to journalists who say a CIA officer who leaks classified information must be prepared to pay the proper penalty, much as reporters like feasting off such leaks.

NYT Editor Bill Keller has some dire words about this and other leak investigations and shares them with National Journal's Murray Waas

" 'I'm not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us,' Keller wrote. 'The Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories, and everyone else who has tried to look behind the war on terror.' Keller asserted that 'there's sometimes a vindictive tone in the way [administration officials] talk about dragging reporters before grand juries and in the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors.' He warned that journalists possibly are 'suffering a bit of subpoena fatigue. Maybe some people are a little intimidated by the way the White House plays the soft-on-terror card. Whatever the reason, I worry that we're not as worried as we should be.' "

That's about as far from the Wall Street Journal position as you can get.